


Part of the Body

by ShaolinQueen



Category: True Detective
Genre: Angst, Drug Abuse, Family Drama, Gen, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-21 16:36:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1557014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShaolinQueen/pseuds/ShaolinQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles through Rust's synesthesia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Absence

**Author's Note:**

> My gratitude to **karategirl448** for her constant support ❤

For many years every contact felt nothing but absence to Rust Cohle. Every touch, any accidental brush or bump was pitch black, it was silence, an unsubstantial jolt, tasteless and cold.

It was Alaska without stars.

Claire, so many colors and nuances and violin chords dripping maple syrup, had turned into rancid red and screeching nails, before she became darkness too.

The last time Rust held his wife, the night after Sophia’s funeral, he desperately sought to no avail for an infinitesimal trace of familiar sounds and hues. He drank from the skin of her neck, he hunted for notes in her hair but the only thing he could taste was the salt of his tears, real on her body and physical on his face and mouth like they hadn’t been since his mother had left.

That night Rust mourned the loss of women and belonging. He liquefied into black matter, sucked into darkness, and drowned in the absence of senses.

Drugs helped. They were an explosion of ugly colors, painful noises and a bitter taste in his mouth. But he could see and taste and hear, at least, sometimes even when he didn’t want too.

So he saw Claire leaving and he saw a baby girl being injected with meth. He saw the sparkles of his gun recoiling in his arm and a lifeless body jerking on the floor till his finger was pulling an empty trigger and blood had reached his feet and shoes.

Then Rust Cohle, _Crash_ , spent four years trudging his way through swamps and revolting creatures, feeling he deserved every speck of filth, hence filling his body with anguish and smarmy turmoil and his mind with sour flashes and raw hallucinations.

Three bullets then felt like life and authenticity, reality and clarity, pain ordinary, purifying and liberating. He lay on the dirt crying metal and viscosity instead of water and salt. _Crash_ was leaking out of him, soaking dust and muck and it felt right.

He woke up in North Shore with the faint taste of maple syrup in his mouth and a distant sound of violins lingering in the air, he was Rust again but too dazed to remember actually seeing Claire.

She showed up that one time only, but the next time Rust woke up on that psychiatric ward he wasn’t abhorrence anymore, and he wasn’t repulsive colors or eerie sounds either, he was void again and he could be filled with something new.

He read a verse, refused a pension and was offered Louisiana, homicide.  

Humidity, murders, hillbillies and bigots? Yeah yeah, as long as he’d stay part of the body.       


	2. Complementary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, my gratitude to **karategirl448**. She's the best, for real ❤

Marty is complementary colors, but it takes Rust months to come to that conclusion. He doesn’t notice sooner because the first shades he senses are the pastel hues of insecurity, the broken sound of subdued guilt and the sour taste of uncertainty, which feel crystal and palpable to Rust, even when Marty does his best to mask them all, covering himself in a pungent fragrance of rage and cockiness.

When he’s thrown against metal lockers it’s not just the physical contact that unquestionably gives Marty away to Rust’s deepest perception, it’s a crisscrossed combination of sensorial layers, it’s the jolt of someone going through his body, then coming out disguised as a mingled frenzy of scents, visions and noises.

It’s been years since the last time _that_ happened but it’s not unexpected: Rust’s been clean for a while now, his senses are frayed yet running again and he’s as self-aware as ever, that’s why he manages to cover his implosion with a sheet of ice and threats of broken bones, even though he needs to check his pulse after.

It happens again when Rust’s arm is roughly grabbed from behind and Marty’s pungent odor, like an antipredator adaptation, blends with the actual smell of the freshly cut grass of his partner’s lawn. It’s screechy and corrosive and Rust doesn't know why he even bothered to try to deal with it in the first place. 

But Maggie, mint and sage over wounds, keeps dragging him closer, and while Marty scratches like contradictions, Rust feels caught in the middle of complementary colors, just the bad ones though, those that, no matter how you combine them, they produce black and black only.

Rust doesn’t understand if he’s at least partially responsible for the change, for being less uncommunicative or for Marty acknowledging his skills as a detective, but as time goes by Rust realizes that Marty can be complementary on his own, an inner conflict of contrasting sounds and tints, even without Maggie’s counterpart. So he feels drops of dew, light blue and freshness when Marty brings him lunch every time Rust forgets to eat or one single saccharine note when his partner tries to mend Rust’s disastrous lack of diplomacy in front of authorities.

The conclusion then, is that Marty feels like a Swedish shower, because Rust doesn’t know where the next jet of water is coming from, or if it will be scalding hot or freezing cold. He only knows that this combination doesn’t produce black only anymore, sometimes the outcome can be white too.

And their confrontation with Ledoux is white all over the place and it’s fundamental, it’s crucial and it means everything to him, because it’s the color of trust.


End file.
